You’re standing in the tile aisle. You spot the exact tile from your quote — and the shelf price is lower than what your contractor wrote down. Your stomach drops a little. Am I getting ripped off?
It’s one of the most common questions we get. And it’s a fair one. So here’s the honest answer, no spin.
Yes — most contractors add a markup on materials. Cornerstone does too.
But it’s not really a markup on the tile. It’s the price of everything that gets that tile to your house, installed right, on time, and covered if something goes wrong. The shelf price is just the sticker. The markup is the work you don’t see.
Here’s what that work actually is.
1. The running around
Someone has to pick the material, price it at a few suppliers, order it, chase it when it’s late, drive to get it, and load it. That’s hours — sometimes days — before a single tile is laid. When we handle it, that time is ours, not yours. You’re not taking a Tuesday off work to sit at the supply desk.
2. Getting it there in one piece
Materials have to be delivered, unloaded, kept dry, protected on site, and staged room by room. Some of it shows up damaged and has to go back. Some breaks mid-job and has to be replaced fast so the crew never stops. That handling — plus the little extra we always order so we don’t run short halfway through — is baked into the number.
3. The mess it makes — and the stuff that gets used up
Every delivery shows up wrapped in something. By the end of a job you’ve got a mountain of boxes, skids, plastic, and cutoffs — and someone has to break it all down, haul it away, and pay the dump fees. On top of that, every install quietly burns through the small stuff nobody lists on a quote: screws, blades, adhesive, tape, shims. And the tools take a beating doing it — blades go dull, bits snap, saws wear out. None of it shows up on the tile’s price tag. All of it goes into getting that tile on your wall.
4. Standing behind it
This is the big one. When we supply the material, we own the outcome. If a slab shows up cracked, if a run of tile is off-shade, if something fails in year two — that’s ours to fix, not yours to fight over. Buy your own materials to “save the markup,” and the moment something’s wrong, you’re the one on the phone with the supplier while the whole job sits. The markup is what lets us just say: we’ve got it.
5. The part that flips it around
Contractors often buy at trade pricing you can’t get walking in off the street. So even with a fair markup, the number on your quote is frequently close to what you’d have paid at retail anyway — except you skipped all the sourcing, hauling, and risk. You didn’t pay more. You paid about the same and got your Saturdays back.
6. The business that’s still here in five years
A fair markup also carries the things that make us a company and not a guy with a truck: liability insurance, WSIB, licensing, the warranty we actually honour, the office that picks up when you call. It’s the difference between a contractor still standing behind your kitchen in five years and one whose phone number stopped working the day after the deposit cleared.
What a markup on materials is not
A fair markup is normal and healthy. The thing to actually watch for is the opposite of a markup:
- A price that looks too good to be true — someone’s cutting a corner you can’t see yet.
- “Pay cash and I’ll skip the markup” — that usually means no insurance, no warranty, and no paper trail if it goes wrong.
- No itemized proposal at all — just a suspiciously low number scribbled on the back of a card.
The contractor to worry about isn’t the one with a fair markup. It’s the one whose price is too low to be real.
How we do it at Cornerstone
We don’t nickel-and-dime you with a line-by-line markup on materials. You get one fixed price for the whole job — locked in writing before we start. It doesn’t creep because the tile came in a few dollars higher than we guessed. That’s our Price Lock Guarantee, and it’s part of the Cornerstone Certainty Stack.
You’re not paying a mystery surcharge. You’re paying one honest number — and we handle every receipt, delivery, and “the supplier sent the wrong colour again” behind the scenes, so you never have to.
If the words on your quotes are confusing too, we broke those down here: estimate vs quote vs proposal. And if you’re wondering why our number usually isn’t the lowest one you’ll get, that’s a whole story of its own: why we aren’t the cheapest.
Want a number you can actually trust?
Book a free Project Diagnostic. We’ll walk your project and give you one clear, fixed price — materials and all — before any work begins. No mystery markups, no ballpark.
Licensed & insured Ontario corporation · Serving Durham Region since 2017 · 5-year warranty on every job
